API Styles

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It allows different software systems to talk to each other.

This section is split into smaller pages:

• REST API
• OpenAPI (Swagger)
• GraphQL
• gRPC
• SOAP

How to Choose

• REST: best default for most teams and public APIs
• OpenAPI: best when you want strong docs/contract tooling around HTTP APIs
• GraphQL: best when clients need flexible shapes of data
• gRPC: best for internal services that want strong typing + performance
• SOAP: mostly for legacy enterprise integrations

References

• RESTful API Design
• MDN HTTP Methods